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JAST USA announces the end of Virtual Mate on G-Collections titles

Jul 25th 2005

San Diego, CA, Monday, July 25, 2005 - JAST USA, the leading licensor and distributor of adult English-language dating-sim games for PCs, announced the end of the Virtual Mate online activation system for G- Collections titles.

The Virtual Mate system was designed to reduce software piracy of dating-sim games by requiring that users have a live Internet connection at game launch time. If an authorized copy of a game was launched, the program would refuse to run. The five G-Collections dating-sim games are Let's Meow Meow, Hitomi My Stepsister, Pick Me, Honey!, The Sagara Family and Figures of Happiness.

"While the Virtual Mate system worked well for almost all customers," said Peter Payne, the company owner, "it did add a layer of inconvenience for some users, especially those who wanted to play one of the five Virtual Mate games on a computer with no Internet connection, for example a laptop. In addition, a lot of customers told us they were refusing to buy the Virtual Mate games on general principle, as a sort of boycott of all copy protection schemes. We decided to listen to them and post the patches that turn off V-Mate for the games."

Owners of the five Virtual Mate games can download the patch for their game by going to http://support.g-collections.com/ and entering their V-Mate code. Future dating-sim games released on the G- Collections and JAST USA labels will not require the Virtual Mate system.

Dating-sims are a unique type of PC game popular in Japan, in which the player must woo virtual pretty girls and find out the keys to each one's hearts in order to have sex with them. Hundreds of dating- sims are released each year in Japan, ranging from erotic simulations with a variety of anime-style females to highly dramatic stories that explore themes usually not handled in mainstream media, to say nothing of video games. JAST USA has been licensing and distributing English-language dating-sim games since 1998, and took over domestic distribution of all G-Collections titles in May of 2005.

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